Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth

Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg

In Cinemas now

A failing novelist is enjoying an all-inclusive beach vacation with his wife on a remote island when a fatal accident exposes the resort’s perverse and terrifying subculture.

How do you like your horror films? Do you want them to play by the rules – full of moves as predictably enjoyable as a wrestling match – or would you rather they pulled the rug from under your feet and just went wherever the darkness of the imagination can take you? Do you like a lot of gore, of the eyes-being-graphically-beaten-out-of-their-sockets variety? Would you like a bit of orgiastic and hallucinogenic pornography thrown in? How are you with bodily fluids, are you open to all comers? Do your teeth grate when anyone mentions ‘trigger warnings’? How about a movie that doesn’t bother with modern sensitivities with regards to the depiction of sex, sexuality, sexual stereotyping, or just about anything frankly?

If your answer to all of those is ‘yes’ then Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror Infinity Pool is for you! I would probably only answer ‘yes’ to two and a half of those, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, I’d argue that it didn’t go far enough.

The premise – which is on the publicity, so not a spoiler – is terrific. James (Alexander Skarsgård) is on holiday with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in a high security beach resort on the fictional island nation of La Tolqa. They meet another couple, Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert) and after a drunken and sexually charged day at the beach, James is involved in a fatal accident for which the punishment is death. Luckily (or perhaps not so luckily) the La Tolqan justice system offers wealthy Americans the option to have themselves cloned on condition that they watch their own execution. At this point, I thought, wow, that’s enough for a whole movie, but it’s just an inciting incident that opens up a depraved highway to an amoral, hedonistic, psychopathic sub-culture, where the price of membership seems to be nothing less that your own humanity.

Here we enter a world familiar to fans of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, with shades of Philip K Dick for good measure. While the Cronenberg brand is burned deep into the lurid flesh of this movie there are notes of Nicolas Roeg, and a distinct whiff of exploitation Eurotrash to add that certain je ne sais quoi.

It might be my age, but at one or two moments I did exclaim ‘No neeeeed!’ in my best nasal Mancunian, much to the amusement of the couple sitting next to me, but I think I may have been wrong. If your film is exploring how it’s only our mortal accountability that stops us from being irretrievably psychotic – and more importantly, allows us to love ourselves – then to illustrate that, you have to throw the worst you’ve got right at us. There isn’t a way of doing this that would get past a 21st Century sensitivity reader.

With that in mind, I’m not sure Cronenberg has gone as far as he could. There’s the suggestion of other ‘transgressions’ that aren’t really explored, and in the denouement, Skarsgård chooses the bloodiest of them, but for anyone familiar with William Burroughs, there was another option that felt like a glaring omission when it didn’t happen. But then again, perhaps that’s a sign that the movie had me so totally immersed, I had been seduced by the dark possibilities it was suggesting.

Holding it all together is another extraordinary performance from Mia Goth, fresh from horror melodrama Pearl, here playing the Christopher Lee role of this twisted White-Lotus-meets-Wicker-Man-on-acid mash up. She’s an extraordinary screen presence, one who throws down the gauntlet to other actors, daring to suggest that our expectations of cinema have become a bit worthily puritanical of late.

Verdict: Infinity Pool is an extraordinary, uncomfortable piece of work that grips from start to finish. It’s extreme (although perhaps not extreme enough) and if that’s going to offend you, it really doesn’t care. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com